A Law for the Lion: A Tale of Crime and Injustice in the Borderlands (review)

222Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober The Culture of Tourism, The Tourism of Culture will find an audience among graduate students, academics, and anyone seriously interested in cultural tourism. Texas State University-San MarcosJeffrey G. Mauck A Lawfor the Lion: A Tale of Crime and Injustice in the Borderlands. By Beatriz de la Garza. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Pp. xviii+142. Illustrations, epilogue, afterword, works cited, acknowledgments, index. ISBN 0-29271614 -1, $39.95, clodi; ISBN 0-292-70189-6. $17.95, paper.) In A Lawfor the Lion: A Tale of Crime and Injustice in the Borderlands, attorney and author Beatriz de la Garza investigates a brutal 1912 double-murder in Laredo, Texas, and die resulting trial. The word "tale" in the subtitle correctly indicates that this is not a formal academic study. The events are as follows: Two members of a prominent Tejano landholding family, patriarch Don Francisco Gutiérrez and his son Manuel, were shot to death by an Anglo tenant/squatter named Alonzo W. Allee, who had connections to prominent Anglo ranchers. Allee benefitted from seemingly preferential treatment by the law and by having a legal team with political connections. After several mondis of delay and a lackluster prosecution, the all-Anglo jury acquitted him of one of die murders, and die remaining murder charge was soon dropped, leaving Allee free to eventually become a "special" Texas Ranger and kill again. A Lawfor the Lion reads like fiction highly informed by history. Much as a mystery writer or detective novelist would, de la Garza builds suspense into die narrative . She does not lay out a thesis or organizational structure at the beginning, but allows the reader to find out what happened and why along the way. Her research is impressive as she analyzes the major actors involved, presents family histories, uncovers political and economic connections, judiciously assesses the physical evidence and witnesses presented at the trial, and even describes the temperature. The real importance ofA Lawfor the Lion, however, is its infusion of history within the narrative. De La Garza examines historical concepts such as Laredo's gente decente or "good, decent, respectable people" (p. 57); the parity among Democrats and Republicans in Laredo; the influence of the Mexican Revolution on local politics; early jurisprudence; the juxtaposition of growing Anglo hegemony and the Tejano community's struggle to persevere; and of course, the sad, familiar theme of racial discrimination. The author persuades the reader that Allee's acquittal was an injustice that reflected the slipping position ofTéjanos from approximate equals to racialized others. A Lawfor the Lion can disappoint. At suspenseful moments in die story, academic content appears suddenly widiout warning as disembodied scholarly digressions . This gives the work a disorganized feel. The antagonist, Alonzo W. Allee, is entirely one-dimensional. De la Garza portrays him as simply sinister, and the absence of a picture of him renders him a faceless evil. This lapse is at odds widi the nuances in the rest of the story. Also, the author's allusion to the Hernandez v. State ofTexas (1954) decision regardingjuries seems a stretch for this 1913 trial in 2oo8 Book Reviews223 which "equal protection" was used to exclude Mexican-American jurors (Pp. 96-97). However, these limitations do not significantly detract from the compelling manner in which Beatriz de la Garza subtly reconstructs a past injustice while at the same time relating it to die broader historical context. A Lawfor the Lion is an instructive and engaging tale of South Texas history. Texas AafM UniversityCarlos Kevin Blanton The Fighting Padre of Zapata: Father Edward Bastien and the Falcon Dam Project. Edited by Maria F. Rollin. Southwestern Studies, no. 10. (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2003. Pp. xxxii+265. Foreword, preface, acknowledgments, note on editorial method, maps, illustrations, epilogue, appendices, notes, bibliography . ISBN 0-87404-285-2. $18.00, paper.) Maria F. Rollin's The Fighting Padre ofZapata makes an important contribution to the historiography of South Texas; it adds to the growing documentary collection of the area's history, and it is an easy read. Rollin salvaged an old manuscript prepared by Father Edward Bastien, who led the fight to assure that American residents displaced by the...